Traduire Ceci; Übersetzen Sie Dies; Tradurre Questo; Vertaal Dit

If you don't know me that well...Hi. My name is Sara Davidson and I can not write poetry. I feel like i'm part of some unauthorized support group of people who have no idea how to start and form poetry, fumbling about placing words on a page hoping that readers will call it "unique." So, when the assignment for our class was to read and find poetry prompts, I was excited. As I began to read though, some of the poetry prompts made it seem like you have to already know what you're doing before you can use the prompt. When I was reading Robin Reagly's Blog, I realized that I would have to already know how to form and construct a poem in order to use one of those prompts. I did search around though, and I found a blog by Charles Bernstein who gave the most amusing poetry prompt I think I have ever come across. The prompt was this: "Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not neccessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English." It is number 3 in this blog: Charles Bernstein. I thought this was absolutely amazing and the most unique way to make poetry. I am excited to try it now!

I actually thought this poetry prompt was funny because I had just been thinking about this idea to translate a foreign poem or song into english becuase my friend had showed me a link on youtube about somebody doing the same exact thing to an Indian song. I thought it was amusing. Enjoy!
Benny Lava

James Joyce

One of the main reasons I like James Joyce is because he is Irish; so am I. I have enjoyed in some way The Dead, but I'm lost in the midst of all the characters and commotion going on in the story. Granted, it is a party scene, and at a party, you don't really see everything that is going on. I do like the idea that he shows us little glimpses of things happening in all the different rooms, but there are just too many names and too many things going on to stay focused. Once you leave one room, you become immersed in another room, so by the time you go back to the previous room, you've forgotten what was going on in there before. That is exactly how I feel about this story so far. I'm being thrown all over the place, but at the same time, I'm getting to know a lot of very interesting people. That's why people tend to go to parties anyway, don't they?